Review of NorTech to determine agency's future

The Fund For Our Economic Future, which provides more than half the operating budget for NorTech, wants to re-evaluate the technology-focused economic development agency's mission before making another round of funding in October.

It asked NorTech to hire a consultant to determine whether its priorities are on track. Fund president Brad Whitehead said it's an appropriate time as a lot of things have happened in technology development in recent years.

"Six years ago there were a handful of incubators and other people doing some things on entrepreneurship, but we had very few venture capital funds," Whitehead said. "Now you have a strong group of incubators in the TechLift program, you have JumpStart and BioEnterprise, and an active venture capital community. That's a very different landscape."

He noted the organization's many accomplishments over the years.

"NorTech has really been the crossroads for the technology community and the mobilizer for some of the highest-priority issues," Whitehead said.

The Fund, which is backed by several local foundations, last week awarded NorTech an $835,000 operating grant and an additional $40,000 to hire consultant Jackie Acho, president of The Acho Group in Shaker Heights. Whitehead said Acho will talk to businesses, economic development organizations and other "key stakeholders" in the community about what NorTech is providing and where its resources need to be.

Dorothy Baunach, president of NorTech, said Acho was chosen because she is familiar with the organization, but also has an unbiased outsider perspective. Acho has consulted with NorTech on various projects.

Baunach said she thinks having a consultant come in will be a good thing for NorTech.

"Any organization can use change," she said. "My thought on this is that we're going to be tweaking the model rather than totally dissolving it or disassembling it and doing something different. I don't know that you'd what to stop doing what we're doing, but we may want to focus differently."

What NorTech does can be hard to understand from the outside because it is involved in many different projects and works with several other organizations, she said.

Baunach described the organization as "almost like an incubator for not-for-profit activity."

It starts or supports economic development programs with the expectation that they'll eventually stand on their own. One example is BioEnterprise, a former NorTech project that is now a stand-alone initiative to help grow fledgling bioscience companies.

"You've got a number of people out there watching what we're doing, and they're kind of questioning whether we should be doing one thing or something else," Baunach said. "Everybody's got ideas. People looking from afar might see some things that we can't see, but there are certainly things we see that they' don't, because we're there. Part of it is just a matter of really defining and communicating what we're doing and why."

Whitehead wouldn't go as far to say that there are any problems with the way NorTech has handled things so far, but emphasized the need for focus.

"You can't have an organization that does everything," he said. "We need to come to an agreement around what really are the priorities."

While Baunach is confident that Acho will see the value NorTech provides through her examination, Whitehead didn't rule out the possibility of dissolving the organization.

"For me, it's hart to imagine where we'd ever get to a point where there's not a role for networking and pursuing connections across our institutions," Whitehead said. "What form that takes will continue to evolve."

In 2007, the Fund paid for $1.25 million of NorTech's $2.25 million operating budget. Another $750,000 came from the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

"I think our track record explains what we can do," Baunach said. "The question in their mind is whether they're getting the maximum bang for their investment. Is it going toward something that they believe, and we believe matters?"

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